Users working with multiple devices in a collaborative environment may create artwork or other electronic content on various devices, such as a smart phone, a desktop computer, a tablet computer, etc. Working with multiple devices may require quickly switching between the devices to leverage the strengths of each device. For example, a user may use an application such as Adobe® Ideas® being executed on a tablet computer to sketch a drawing. The user may then transfer the sketch to an instance of an additional application on a different computing device, such as an instance of Adobe® Illustrator® being executed on a desktop computer. The user may transfer the sketch back to the tablet computer for further refinement of the sketch.
While the relatively small size of mobile computing devices aids in portability and collaboration with other users, the size may also prove to be a hindrance for some users and applications, particularly for users who need to view and share electronic assets such as graphics, images, and drawings created on other devices and platforms having different display sizes, resolutions, and color palettes. Similarly, the ability to share and transfer electronic assets between mobile touch devices and other computing devices, such as tablet computers, desktop computers, and laptop computers, is sometimes hindered by the relative lack of storage space on mobile touch devices. Additionally, styli and other touch input devices used to interact with applications executing on touch computing devices typically lack sufficient storage space to store electronic assets users wish to transfer to other touch applications and/or touch computing devices.
Despite advances in mobile technology, mobile devices having touch screens (i.e., ‘mobile touch devices’) typically have greater limitations on display size, memory capacity, data storage capacity, central processing unit (CPU) capacity, and networkability than desktop and laptop computers. Due to these limitations, some mobile device operating platforms with touch screen interfaces, such as the iOS operating system (OS) developed by Apple Inc., the Android platform from Google Inc., the Microsoft Windows® 8 OS, the Microsoft Windows® Phone OS, the Symbian OS, the Blackberry OS from Research In Motion (RIM) and similar operating systems cannot efficiently or securely be used for cross-device or cross-application sharing of electronic assets. These limitations present challenges when data needs to be displayed and shared in response to copy and paste inputs within a touch-sensitive user interface (UI) of a mobile device. Given the versatility of touch computing devices in general, and mobile touch devices in particular, users of these devices may wish to efficiently and securely store electronic assets copied to a clipboard in a source application and/or computing device and also efficiently retrieve, render, and display these assets in a target application and/or device where a paste operation is initiated.
Prior solutions for transferring data between applications executed on different devices may include manually transferring files via a network, such as the Internet, a wide area network (WAN), or a local area network (LAN). Some prior solutions include manually transferring files via an Internet-based cloud service. Such solutions may involve multiple steps, thereby slowing the workflow of a user. Such solutions for transferring data between different devices may also result in confidential or proprietary data being sent via insecure communication channels and/or being stored ‘in the clear’ (i.e., in unencrypted form) in network data servers, file servers, database servers, cloud storage, or web servers accessible by third parties. Prior data transfer solutions may also present shortcomings in transferring electronic content between multiple applications executing or accessed from the same computing device. For example, transferring assets between different applications such as Adobe® Ideas®, Adobe® Illustrator®, Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Kuler®, and Paper by FiftyThree, Inc. may not be supported by traditional copy and paste operations using a local clipboard of a computing device. For example, a tablet computer may include multiple applications that are strictly sandboxed from one another. A first application may be focused on certain types of drawings or other electronic content and another application may be focused on other types of drawings or other electronic content. A user may wish to quickly switch between the two applications to transfer data.